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This is a significant departure from previous policies and is at the centre of the Communist Party’s effort to sustain its unchallenged rule.

For the three decades since China began its so-called “opening up" policy, absolute GDP growth has been the ultimate goal.

But while this has delivered a million millionaires, it has also left the country with a dangerously large wealth gap.

The ruling party has attempted to hide this by not officially releasing the country’s Gini Coefficient for the past decade, but a Chinese NGO recently put it at 0.438.

This exceeds United Nations “warning levels".

“The index sends a warning to the government to pay attention to the large income disparity," Xia Xueluan, a sociological professor at Peking University told the state-run Global Times newspaper in September.

The timing of the article was surely no co-incidence.

Since its publication there has been much talk among government-linked academics of China’s growing wealth gap, culminating in Hu’s bold declaration to double incomes over the next eight years. To achieve this China will need to develop its economy at about 7 per cent annually to 2020.

If that goal is met the country will have a middle class of about 500 million people. This would continue China’s transformation from a factory to the world to one of the world’s biggest consumers of everything from coffee to smartphones.

But the doubters have already emerged.

Yang Fan, a senior economist at the China University of Political Science and Law, doubted the 7 per cent annual growth target could be met considering the country’s ageing population.

“Talking about doubling average per capita income is also pointless," he said.

Mr Yang said China’s income structure needed to change whereby the middle class received better wages, rather than concentrating on average income growth which would increase anyway as the economy expanded.

To achieve this structural shift in wages the monopoly held by state-owned enterprises over much of the economy, needs to be broken. On this Hu has had an each-way bet.

While he spoke of the need to “deepen reform" of state-owned enterprises, the President also said China needed to “invest more state capital in major industries and key fields that comprise the lifeline of the economy and are vital to national security".

But then to confuse the issue further Hu said there should be a “level playing field" for both state and private capital.

How stridently his words will be implemented will largely depend on the make-up of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body.

Factions aligned with Hu and former president Jiang Zemin are still said to be haggling over the make-up of the committee, which is expected to be cut from nine to seven members.

It will be announced on Wednesday morning and all eyes will be on who becomes vice-premier with responsibility for the economy.

If the former Central Bank official Wang Qishan takes the post then reformers may hold the upper-hand. But Wang is said to be facing fierce competition from Tianjin Party Secretary Zhang Gaoli, a man who who is seen as a championed of heavy state intervention in the economy.

But for China’s social media pundits, perhaps the more important test will be if the sky is blue in Beijing when the new Standing Committee is unveiled.